Rudy Rucker

Nice to be reminded that my first blast of true sci fi sensawunda came from stories like these, not big bold space opera, but strange twisted, weird and often hilarious stories that could end in utter global catastrophe and still somehow feel cheerful about it.

Spanning thirty years of collaboration, these stories remain amazingly fresh and sharp and challenging and delightful, with no regard for the conventional boundaries of reality or normality while somehow remaining grounded enough in show more both to deliver satisfying coherent narratives no matter how deeply strange the stories themselves truly get. Each story features recognisable stand-ins for the author themselves in various guises, which shouldn't work so well so often, but they do.

6/4/23 Just to note my reading of another of their transreal wetware slime-mould-jelly-phone post-pandemic climate change futures, Fibonacci's Humors (sic), once again a lot of fun with the addition of a distinct Italian flavouring to its ruined-Austin setting. show less

This book has more novel ideas and settings from one paragraph to the next then most sf&f authors manage to squeeze out in the course of an entire tome. This book is some combination of a drug induced hallucinatory vision with Alice in Wonderland, yet manages to pull off a clear hero journey's plot. In contrast to the formulas and tropes of most books I read, this 2-decade old book is fresh, original, and compellingly crazy.

Rudy Rucker contemplates, at great length, the idea that perhaps the entire universe can be viewed as the working out of a series of computations, something akin to an immense implementation of cellular automata (like the well-known Game of Life, in which grids of light and dark squares follow simple rules to evolve complicated patterns over time). He looks at this idea on many different scales, from the basic laws of physics, to the workings of the brain, to the behavior of human show more societies.

It's hard for me to know quite what to say about this book. On the one hand, it offers some interesting and often quite reasonable and worthwhile perspectives on the world, and it does a good job of expressing some complicated mathematical and scientific ideas, such as chaos theory, in a very condensed way that works surprisingly well. (Although there are sections that get a little more technical, and a basic grounding in math, computer science, or physics might be helpful for some of it.) On the other hand, Rucker's writing is very rambly, and he makes a lot more sense on some subjects than on others. He also includes a lot of musings about his own life and snippets of his wacky SF writing, which I don't think were nearly as interesting to me as to him. Plus, he's got an odd and thoroughly unrepentant mystical streak, which doesn't sit particularly comfortably with me.

There's also a big, fundamental flaw at the heart of his whole premise. Namely, he defines "computation," in part, as something fundamentally deterministic. It's difficult to reconcile a fully deterministic universe with the seemingly probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, though, and he does so mostly with a wishful-thinking argument that basically says, oh, well, I think there ought to be some way to get rid of this aspect of quantum mechanics because I don't like it, so I'm just going to assume it can somehow be made go away. For all I know, there's a chance he's right about that, but to call it unconvincing would be a universe-sized understatement.

So, yeah, while reading this was kind of an interesting journey, there's a limit to how seriously I'm taking it as a whole. I will say that this is the sort of book that if I'd read it in my high school or college years (not that that's possible, since it was published in 2005, well after I graduated), I might have had a little bit of a "Whoa, you just blew my mind!" kind of reaction. Now, though, I fear my response is much more along the lines of a noncommittal "hmm." show less

Lyrical first-person prose and under-the-gun action kept me reading this interesting, if completely chaotic and dubious story about a competition between two hyper-hormonal math grad students for a woman. Guided by their testosterone (to the edge of satire and beyond) they accomplish feats of mathematical theory and practice, rock-and-roll, fame, fortune, enlightenment, and other adventures, of a magnitude on par with Baron Munchausen. The math theory was fascinating. I had difficulty show more overcoming one character after another presented as ethically inept and psychologically fixed in stone. The book ends with the protagonist having grown not a single beard hair. So what was the point of the big balls anyway? Maybe it's love. show less